Me and Them: Observations from 50 Years of Interacting with Women

It's time to reevaluate all the stereotypes.

Relations between the sexes have gotten a little tense. So, in "Women & Men," a special section in Esquire's April 2015 issue, we candidly address a complicated question that we should all be discussing openly: What is the state of relations between the men and women of America today?

Documentaries sometimes show snippets of the social life of members of the Taliban. Seeing these dudes with their hipster beards all sitting there, chewing the lamb fat, and prefacing every remark, however banal, with "God willing," watching the women come and go—not talking about Michelangelo but discreetly bringing more scoff and then disappearing—I ask myself a question that quickly becomes several questions. What is wrong with these blokes? And how did the idea that doing everything without women that can be done without them—if you want to have sex with them or hit them, their presence is necessarily required—ever take hold? More to the point, how is it sustainable? Wouldn't at least one of these cats have an inkling that life might be more fun if women were around in some capacity other than as cooks and servants?

But then I think back to my own adolescence and early adulthood and am struck by certain similarities. I was born in 1958 and went to a single-sex madrassa—sorry, I mean British grammar school. The girls' school was on the other side of town, and there were "discos" where you could potentially meet girls, but aside from these evenings (which tended to be spent entirely in the company of mates from school), contact with the opposite sex was severely rationed. When you met a girl, you didn't talk to her, you chatted her up. This was the only form of communication possible, even if it was a language and social skill you could master only if you had successfully chatted up girls before.

In the sixth form (basically senior year in the States), things lightened up when a few girls transferred over to our school—which was good preparation for Oxford, where, after centuries of exclusion, a handful of women had recently been allowed through the gates of my venerable college. But the ratio of men to women at Oxford was still terrible. At school, when I thought about girls and sex, I pictured breasts and legs; at college all I could think about was the ratio. If, in spite of that ratio, I ever met a woman, I became so flummoxed that, on one occasion, I asked, with great charm, if she could do my ironing. I didn't want her to do my ironing—I wanted to have sex—but I couldn't think of anything else to say. (It is significant that one of the texts we'd studied for A-level—I would have been seventeen at the time—was John Osborne's Look Back in Anger. Two of the play's three acts begin with two different women—first Jimmy Porter's wife, Alison, then his lover, Helena—doing the ironing. Looking back on it now, the misogyny of the play—justified by that hoary English chestnut, class hatred—is astounding. Essentially women are there to do the ironing and get yelled at. Again the kinship with the enlightened sexual politics of the Taliban is closer than one might think.) At Oxford, as at school, there were discos, but the center of social life was the pub. Women were permitted in pubs, of course, but these peculiar institutions were overwhelmingly male—and they remained my favorite form of social after I moved to London and well into my thirties.

I didn't want her to do my ironing—I wanted to have sex—but I couldn't think of anything else to say.

By then I had met some women: feminists—"them hardcore ones," as Bob Dylan put it in an earlier context. You know the scene: A Question of Silence was the greatest film ever made. If it had somehow been possible to combine Rosa Luxemburg and Andrea Dworkin in a single person, I would have asked for her hand in helping to repair my bike. "How many radical feminists does it take to change a light bul—?" "That's not funny!"

Some of the rhetoric from the 1980s seems, in retrospect, more than a little extreme, but it was during this period that I picked up habits I'll never change: If I am walking behind a woman on an otherwise deserted street, I hurry up to overtake her or cross to the other side of the street so that she won't feel threatened (though the act of speeding up could itself be construed as a threat). What was startling was not just the changes in my own behavior but how quickly and thoroughly earlier attitudes and habits came to seem ludicrous. How extraordinary that there was a time when girls and women didn't play soccer. And how lovely to hear the occasional complaint about "women drivers": like a rare glimpse of an emasculated species of mammal.

The belt-and-braces era of radical feminism was succeeded by a period in which hard-won practical political gains—in employment, legislation, and so on—went hand in hand with the insistent sexualization or rampant babe-ization of women. Back in the 1980s, it was a rule that women didn't shave anywhere; then, in the 2000s, we entered a hegemonic phase of full-body depilation. But the guys were subject to their own self-generating corporeal regimens, too, with magazines waxing lyrical about abs and pecs, urging them to sculpt their bodies into a state of Beckhamesque perfection. So while it was not exactly balanced, the see was—and is—in the process of being sawed.

As you grow older as a heterosexual man, meanwhile, you become more, not less, fascinated by women and their beauty. In my mid-twenties, I slept with quite a few women in their mid-twenties, but I didn't fully appreciate how wonderful this was—because I was in my mid-twenties. The mere fact of growing older means that you become more and more conscious of the primal power of the way certain women look. By the time you are old, it may well be all that you think of. This is wisdom of a simple biological kind. Far from undermining any commitment to feminist principles, it goes along easily—hand in hand, as it were—with a deepening awareness of the obligation of being a man: of not being or behaving like a jerk.

In "High Windows," the middle-aged Philip Larkin famously looks on at a pair of kids, guesses "he's fucking her," and decides "this is paradise / Everyone old has dreamed of all their lives." Less explicitly, what I see among the younger generation—jeez, just typing that phrase nudges me several steps closer to the grave—is something not paradisiacal but enviable, admirable, and ordinary: the ease of communication between young men and women, a shared assumption of commonality and equality. Since this ease often seems to like express itself in a shared idiom of like total inarticulacy, perhaps it's better put negatively, emphasizing the lack of feelings that made my early dealings with girls resemble first contact between travelers from the west and a tribe who have been living for centuries in the Amazon jungle: meetings defined by mutual strangeness so strong as to be incommunicable ("How do you iron your clothes?" "What's ironing? What are clothes?"). The really great thing is that the opportunity cost of this has been negligible. Nature has ensured that familiarity does not in any way diminish the wonder—the joy, the magic, the pain—that these encounters will forever have in store for all concerned.

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